When 2 ouches make an aaahhh

Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 2:48 pm (Hack for Hire)
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I had one of my very rare face-to-face client meetings yesterday morning downtown. Even though I’ve lived in Pittsburgh my whole life, I still hate driving downtown — too many years commuting by bus and never having to worry about one-way streets, construction detours, traffic bottlenecks, or parking hassles. It always makes me sweat.

It was the parking that did me in. In typical “I’m never late” fashion, I left 1-1/2 hours before my meeting for the 30-mile drive into town. That should have been plenty of time to wait out any leftover tunnel delays, park the car, and maybe still have time to grab a coffee. Turns out I had the tunnel delays covered but did not realize that every blessed parking garage would have the “FULL — LEASES ONLY” sign out. After driving by 4 or 5 of these beauties for 20 minutes, (going in circles and waiting in traffic to get to them all), I contemplated heading uptown, many blocks away from my meeting, to my trusty Kaufmann’s garage (I guess that’s Macy’s now — who are they kidding? It’ll always be Kaufmann’s), but that meant that I would be late after all, and what if it was full too? (My feet, in “meeting shoes,” were also balking at the prospect of that long walk.)

So I desperately pulled into one of those outside lots you see but never enter. Two fine gentleman greeted me and I gave them my sweetest “Yes, I’m a modern businesswoman but if it gets me a damn space I’ll act all helpless just like all the women on The Apprentice did” smile. Fortunately, they must have been visually impaired, and after calling out to the attendant next door, commenting that I was beautiful, and with me grinning like an idiot and actually saying “I’m desperate,” (the guys loved that) the attendant agreed, sternly asking “How long?” After “a couple hours” was met with a stern “Are you sure?” I revised it to “Oh 3 hours or so…I have a meeting (smile, smile)” and hoped that wasn’t a deal breaker.

Thankfully, I handed him my keys, got my ticket, and looked around trying to get a mental note of just where I was leaving the car. (“Under the giant orange billboard, across from the United Steelworkers Building” was what I settled on, street names having little meaning in my landmark-oriented, directionally impaired world.)

So I hoofed it the several blocks to the meeting (still 12 minutes early, thank you), feet killing me from having worked the clutch so long in heels. The meeting was fine, I had a great lunch with my client (a former coworker), and made it back to the lot (yay, found it) just 10 minutes or so over 3 hours.

I knew it would be a fortune, so wasn’t surprised at the $17 price tag. I gave the guy a 20, but when I got my change, he had given me a 5 and two 1s. As we were walking over to my car, I did an internal, “Well, clearly $17 is too much…” but my conscience won out, “Hey, you gave me too much. I just needed another 1 and not this 5.”

Not clear on what went wrong, he took the 5 and never gave me the 1. By now my hand was on my car door. I did a mental “not worth it,” got in my car and happily found my way east (no small feat for someone who has always gone north).

I now know it’s possible to feel cheated and satisfied at the same time. My bill was now $18 (ouch), but I did the right thing (aaahh) and gave the gouging parking lot owners back their $4 error, supplemented with a $1 bonus (ouch). In hindsight, it was a small price to pay for going all Scarlett O’Hara in the first place just to get in the lot. In the end, you do what you have to do in the business world, and if it only costs you an extra $1, AND you keep your conscience clear, I’d say you’re doing pretty darn good.

The man who will use his skill and constructive
imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar,
instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed. 
                                                                   ~ Henry Ford

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The Little Store

Tuesday, November 6, 2007 at 7:46 pm (Youngest of Seven)
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Working my way through leftover Halloween candy makes me think of growing up a block away from candy Mecca.

“Lindow’s” (like windows), also known as “the little store,” was where you went for a quick gallon of milk, loaf of Mancini’s, popsicle, or most importantly, bagful of candy, long before the days of CoGos, Get-Gos, and Stop&Gos.

Perched on a corner with PAT and school bus stops and Bronx (ball) Field a few steps away, Lindow’s was a fixture, its green awning a refuge for waiting bus riders. Small even to me, it was jam packed: cash register on the left, freezer and cooler on the right, candy in the tall display case in the back, bread and baked goods in the center.  

Kids were banging through the squeaky front door from open till close, toting lists from mom or in hot pursuit of their own agendas. In my case, that would have been one thing: penny candy.

The gray-haired Lindows had to be saints in disquise. Every day, Mr. or Mrs. would patiently wait on a parade of kids clutching sweaty nickels and dimes (even a quarter once in a while), face pressed up to that penny candy window, pointing. “Two pixie sticks, uuuummmmm, a Bub’s Daddy, ummmmmm, 3 Bazooka, ummmmm 2 no 3 fish, ummmmm a flying saucer, how much is that?” And on and on until the little bags were full and everyone’s change depleted.

Wax lips or teeth, candy necklaces, wax pencils or bottles with disgusting “juice” inside, 3 kinds of candy cigarettes (chocolate with foil wrapper, hard candy with painted pink tip, and, the best choice, bubble gum wrapped in paper just like a cigarette. If you blew into it hard enough sometimes sugar would come out and look like smoke), shoestring licorice, regular twisted licorice in chocolate, cherry, and UGH licorice flavors, boxes of unbelievably salty pumpkin seeds, candy pills (smarties), jaw breakers…they had it all. And we ate it all. As often as we were lucky enough to have a coin to our name.

My husband, in the supreme one-upmanship ever, should write his own post. His father and uncle ran the family business: Somerset Candy Company, a wholesale candy/tobacco/paper goods distributorship. He could (and did) have candy all the time…and baseball cards, novelty cards, toy cars and planes, all the stuff of youth (most of which is still in our attic earmarked “for eBay”).

But I digress. Lindow’s was our little Mecca. I’ve seen specials on Food Network about the resurgence in penny candy as boomers try to recapture their childhood. No doubt you remember your favorites. If you crave a fix, a popular regional landmark, Baldinger’s, still sells it. But sadly, Lindow’s and so many “little stores” are long gone. Just a sweet — really sweet — memory. Oh, and when the Lindows retired, the little store was converted into — get this — a dentist office. How sweet is that!?

Once in a young lifetime one should be allowed to have
as much sweetness as one can possibly want and hold. 
                                                                   ~ Judith Olney

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Memory full. Shut down some applications and try again.

Friday, November 2, 2007 at 2:51 pm (Smile Lines)
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You never really think it will happen to you. You sail through your 20s, 30s, maybe even early 40s, and don’t really know what all the fuss is about. Middle age? It’s just a number.

Then it’s YOUR number and it’s up.

I get that you can’t see up close anymore. I get that you can’t burn a calorie even if you light yourself on fire. I get that you can’t be offended anymore when people call you ma’am. I get it. I accept it.

But I don’t accept what’s happened to my brain.

Oh, I accepted long ago that my “smart years” were behind me. The years where I had the capacity to memorize finance formulas and write papers about the French presidency or the role of misperception in the Berlin and Cuban crises and fill blue books answering things like “Is the Soviet Union an evil empire or a paranoid giant.”

Huh? I forgot all that years ago. (Turns out, none of it mattered a whit in the real world anyway.)

But now it seems my “sharp years” are behind me too. Used to be, if I needed an answer, it was there. Ask me the name of a street, actor, 4th grade classmate, flower, spice, brand, tool, The ’70s for $300, Alex  — never had to hesitate a second. Now you can all but see the googly icon spinning in my eyes while the search engine tries to connect, only to stop short: “Neuralnet Explorer cannot find the requested page.” So many broken links.

I’ve tried everything I know to increase speed. I archive old files or delete them altogether, keep viruses at bay, backup regularly (onto paper — more reliable than disk), purge temp files, reboot every morning. Short of replacing the whole operating system, a risky proposition at best for older models like mine, I seem to be stuck with a plodding dinosaur that was once my nimble CPU. Last year’s model that hasn’t the capacity for this year’s upgrades.

I knew I should have sprung for the extended warranty…but of course, you never really think it will happen to you. 

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.
                                                                 ~ Jennifer Yane

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